8 ms·

Tableau Software Threatened? Rival Growing at 70% Just Raised $103M

71 points by Varcht 8y ago

ineedasername 8y ago
Not really a threat. this article is mostly about Looker, which is a very different product with a significantly higher entry level price tag. Tableau on the other hand is part of the curriculum in many information science programs in colleges, and is significantly embedded in the enterprise sector. it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part or a black swan type of event to dislodge them any time soon.
- ziont 8y ago
  2k hook in for the license and then charging half a mil for actually implementing your data and biz model?
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    Do you mean that as Tableau's cost? Not where I'm at. And maybe you'd have to pay half a mil to implement a data model if you're hiring consultants and starting from scratch, but if you're in such a state that's going to be a cost no matter the product. No product is going to model your data for you or build something like a semantic layer. Those are (mostly) completely separate tasks from the BI layer. Where I'm at we simply pointed Tableau at existing data sources built for performance reporting already.
- blowski 8y ago
  Bit of anecdata: I used Looker in a previous gig, where we used it mostly a development tool for constructing and optmising difficult queries. The business continued to use Tableau for BI.
  - cuchoi 8y ago
    How did you use Looker to optimize queries?
- tensor 8y ago
  We're going through the process of getting a BI solution. There are many players and Tableau doesn't fair well against them. I can see them holding on to existing customers because switching is hard, but they absolutely have a lot of competition for new sales.
  - feydaykyn 8y ago
    Would you share the ones you found worthwhile? Our business wants PowerBI, but the sys admin side sounds like a pain : it seems we need: 1) a consultant to setup the visualisations 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases 3) the api automation capabilities are unclear says the expert (eg: create a new dashboard for a new customer ? Update all the visualisations through a script? Etc) PowerBI feels so Microsoftish, I'm really on the market for something else
    - mjirv 8y ago
      Looker's API functionality is pretty extensive if that's something you care a lot about.
    - mbesto 8y ago
      PowerBI is really an amazing for the price point (free-ish for O365 accounts) for most businesses out there (10~300 employees). It's not one size fits all and YMMV. 1) You have this problem regardless 2) Huh? Why not just the cloud version? Are you trying to report directly on a productive transactional database for a software app? See #3 about source of data. 3) Depends on your source data. I build a dashboard for sales in with data from SalesForce in like 2 hours.
    - go_prodev 8y ago
      I'm currently helping a large company with their transition from Tableau/SAP/Excel to Power BI. The adoption has been extremely painless and business users are very comfortable creating reports and discovering new ways to represent their data. In response to your points above... 1) A consultant is not required to set up visualisations. With minimal training (a few hours) most users understand the fundamentals and are ready to go. 2) We use AWS Redshift. You have the option to import data into Power BI or do a direct query from the cloud platform to Redshift with odbc. 3) what are you trying to do with the API? To automate reports you normally set up a gateway connection to your data source and schedule the refresh in powerbi cloud. No API required normally. It also can use office 365 or Azure AD for single sign on, making sys admin activities a breeze. Send me a message if you want to discuss anything specific and I'd be happy to help you out.
- zhobbs 8y ago
  "it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part" As a former customer of Tableau, it feels like this has already happened right? I worked at a company where many teams used it, and there were zero defenders of Tableua when it came time to decide whether to renew...it's a mess, especially on Mac.
  - bsg75 8y ago
    Is there an alternative on Mac? Any tool that has a purely web based design UI is not limited to an OS, so the alternatives would have to supply a native Mac design tool as Tableau does.
    - harrisreynolds 8y ago
      We are working on a cross-platform solution at Chartly. We are still early but can already create dashboards more quickly than what I've seen Tableau do. See https://chart.ly/ https://chart.ly/ for details! :-)
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    my workplace uses both Cognos and Tableau. compared to cognos, tableau is a dream to use. There's some non overlapping functionality in cognos, but where tableau can be used it is greatly preferred. Coming from that "traditional" enterprise BI, tableau feels anything but stagnant. Spotfire seems like the closest competitor, but its barrier for entry went up sharply after acquisition. Power BI has a ways to go (but I think given the tech stack behind MS is the biggest threat to tableau as it matures long term)
olivermarks 8y ago
Growing a startup '70%' is very different to running a publicly listed global company '...Looker is trying to become cash flow positive -- and its revenues are growing faster than its headcount. "We have visibility to cash flow break even over the next couple of years. We plateaued in spending. We now have 600 employees and expect to add 200 in 2019. We are seeing our cash burn rate decline," he explained.'
- kgc 8y ago
  How can they add so many employees and have costs decline? Are employees not their majority cost?
  - olivermarks 8y ago
    making more revenue
sevensor 8y ago
I'm not sure the analysis front-end is really where the money is at. There are lots of industries that have trouble getting their data to a place where it can be analyzed at all. I know some very successful companies here in flyover country that picked a sector where this is a problem and made a business of fixing it.
- thenaturalist 8y ago
  Would you mind sharing some examples? I'm in the Business Intelligence space and always interested in what is available for integration & ETL.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    Ag is huge, as you might expect from flyover country. Pipelines. Marketing data.
CryoLogic 8y ago
Just a question on wording, but doesn't 70% imply currentRevenue * .7. Whereas they really mean 170% aka currentRevenue * 1.7?
- giarc 8y ago
  It can mean anything the company wants. 70% more site visits per month, trial users, support requests, paid users etc etc. Unless explicitly stated, it's hard to determine what metric they are talking about.
- raquo 8y ago
  Growth is expressed as % over the previous period, not of previous period, so 70% is the right number in this context.
mwexler 8y ago
This is another "Forbes Contributor" post. This means that it's just a blog post, though, admittedly, Cohan is a smart guy. Does anyone else think Forbes should do more to separate volunteer content from editorially directed and reviewed journalistic content? Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand? It feels like, to me, someone saying "I went to Stanford" in a conversation because they walked on the campus. Just because Forbes hosts the content doesn't mean it's at the same quality as a true Forbes spawned story. Since the Forbes.com front page appears to now be almost 3/4 contributors, I guess it's working for them. Still feels wrong.
- sailfast 8y ago
  I typically ignore things on Forbes for this reason. In this case, Mr. Cohan works in venture capital for SoFi (according to his Twitter bio) and it's not immediately clear if he has a stake in any of these companies or why he's taking a shot at Tableau other than for the clickbait. It would be nice to know whether his current employer has any material stake in either company before reading. I understand he is also a business school professor but I would expect a disclaimer for an article like this.
- zhobbs 8y ago
  There is a really big metric on their dashboard, "Pageviews", and this is a best of all worlds solution (cheaper, more content, diverse content, diverse authors promoting their content, forbes.com SEO juice, etc).
- johnatwork 8y ago
  Yeah I tend to ignore Contributor "articles" such as these, they are so one sided, and seem more like an ad than anything else.
- stevecalifornia 8y ago
  Forbes is cashing in their brand name, built over a long period of time, for quick wins. It's sad that they don't value their legacy.
  - 8y ago
trhway 8y ago
Sounds like IPO prep.
thebiglebrewski 8y ago
We use Looker and it's amazing. Comparing it with Tableau was laughable for people used to modern SaaS tools. Tableau was so far behind...
georgewfraser 8y ago
My company shares a lot of customers with Looker, and from my point of view there’s a couple reasons why they’re so successful. First, Looker has two layers. The dashboard layer gives you tables, charts and filters. The explore layer allows you to go in and build your own pivot tables off the same underlying models. No other BI tool has built an explore layer that’s as successful in practice as Looker’s. Second, the underlying model of both layers is written in code and under version control. This probably makes sense to most HN readers but in the BI world this is very contrarian. If you ask most business users who make BI purchasing decisions, version control and pull requests are the last thing they’ll ask for. But it turns out it’s exactly what you need to maintain a complex BI deployment.
- numbsafari 8y ago
  The version control and pull request design is exactly why I've selected Looker. LookML enables the power of the explore functionality as well. Looker's visualizations, however, are very weak when compared to the competition. It's been their weakness for years now, and they've really failed to address it. One aspect of Looker that I've also generally enjoyed is their on-boarding and support processes. They do a superb job at this and I feel like they should be a model for startups selling into B2B.
  - georgewfraser 8y ago
    I agree that their viz is weak. I comfort myself by saying that this is the easy part and they'll surely fix it eventually...still waiting after two years.
    - groj 8y ago
      I think the community can have a big impact here, there are so many libraries that make it easy to add custom visuals. Specifically, vega is incredible https://vega.github.io/ https://vega.github.io/ and there is a port for Looker https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite
madamelic 8y ago
Forbes seems to be 95% ads now. Not just the content. I went on the page and a huge 3/4 page banner scrolled my view, then another popped into the side, then Forbes had a pop over asking for my email. Yikes!
- rchaud 8y ago
  Places like Forbes, Inc and Huffpost appear to exist solely for content writers to use their logo on their portfolio websites under the heading "Published In: ".
  - jjtheblunt 8y ago
    Well they're also "owned" by lobbyist-style groups. HuffPost is clearly (ludicrously) pro Democrat, Forbes anti-Apple, and so on. It's close to amusing.
manigandham 8y ago
Tableau is the best at getting non-technical users to be instantly productive, and is completely unmatched in pure analytical abilities and visualizations. They aren't standing still here either. However Tableau has absolutely screwed up their evolution into a cloud-based service. The current single-user desktop software with client/server design is painful and archaic, and the Tableau cloud is just a hosted server run on undersized hardware. They are losing a lot of business renewals because of this, even if the consultancy and enterprise deals will keep going for awhile.
- xemdetia 8y ago
  Something I want to complain about here is the complete lack of due diligence that product-based, enterprise-focused companies fail at as they move to SaaS. If your primary customers are Federal/Finance/Health Care, you can't pull the plug on a product that is on prem and put it in the cloud until you get the compliance ducks in a row. I had hoped that GDPR would have fixed that but I am still seeing several companies making the same mistakes even today where this playbook should have been figured out.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Sure, but I don't think that's the problem here. Tableau's architecture is client/server using "workbook" files instead of a central server accessible via the web. They need to change that first, then they can make on-prem and hosted versions of it.
- nomel 8y ago
  > completely unmatched in pure analytical abilities and visualizations. Have you tried looked at Tibco Spotfire? I'd say it's a very good match. I find it much more intuitive than Tableau.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    I don't want desktop software from the 90s anymore.
- 8y ago
joshdance 8y ago
Better (less clickbaity) headline: Looker raises 103 million in a series E to compete in enterprise BI.
- capkutay 8y ago
  I really hate the 'This startup's revenue grew at x%!' Like what does that actually mean? For all we know they went from $100k to $170k in revenue while raising $100 million dollars. It could either be very impressive or just lame click bait to inflate a company they invested way too much money in.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
Anyone checked PowerBI from Microsoft? I think it's a great BI solution that isn't widely known yet. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA
- itslennysfault 8y ago
  Isn't widely known? It was the top rated BI solution by Gartner in 2017 and 2018. Full disclosure I used to work on it, and when I left we had over a million users so some people might have heard of it. [2017](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-microsoft-as-a-leader-in-bi-and-analytics-platforms-for-ten-consecutive-years/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-m...) [2018](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-recognizes-microsoft-as-a-leader-in-analytics-and-bi-platforms-for-11-consecutive-years/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-recognizes-...)
- rchaud 8y ago
  PowerBI is very well known.
mjirv 8y ago
Has anyone used Arcadia Data (the other company mentioned in the article) and have thoughts on it? I work in BI and had never heard of it before reading this.
dcposch 8y ago
Surprised nobody here mentioned Mode Analytics. Unlike Looker or Tableau, it requires users to know SQL. That said: if you're an org where the business people know SQL or are willing to learn--Mode is clean, simple, and super powerful. My company had a great experience with this. Our COO was super proficient with Excel. I showed him basic SQL, he loves it and has learned quickly. The jump from Excel power user to SQL user is totally doable, and probably most people making custom reports are already at least in the former category! Additionally, a few of us have substantial Pandas experience: Mode makes it trivial to go from SQL to a Jupyter like notebook w Pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn etc all already there--no need for Python version or dependency hell. Zero devops at any layer below the raw datastore (MySQL / Redshift / etc). It's really nice. You write code purely against open standards--SQL, pandas etc. Looker uses a proprietary query language, LookML. I am not tempted to go learn it.
- thongda 8y ago
  Not the same level, Tableau is super strong in visualization, Looker is about Data Modeling, the new language is not that hard, but the most valuable thing is data model and explore
bradhe 8y ago
Just exited a company the was competitive to Tableau and Looker. The BI space is insanely competitive, the lock in is very deep, and there are a thousand small players swimming in the wake of Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, and a few other "owners" of the category. Looker doesn't threaten Tableau. It doesn't need to--at least for now. The space is growing at a crazy rate.
harrisreynolds 8y ago
There is lots of opportunity still to innovate in this space. We are focusing on making it super easy to create great looking charts and dashboards really easily at Chartly [1]. Personally I am surprised by lots of the "state of the art" options out there where the result is EITHER ugly or HARD TO USE. We still have a ways to go, but you can create good looking, interactive dashboards with our platform very easily. Here is an example of a dashboard with NFL data: https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard [1] https://chart.ly https://chart.ly
qwertycrackers 8y ago
My company uses Looker a lot. It's fairly good. My only complaint is that its web-native interface makes it AWFULLY slow to do the simplest things.

71 points by Varcht 8y ago

Not really a threat. this article is mostly about Looker, which is a very different product with a significantly higher entry level price tag. Tableau on the other hand is part of the curriculum in many information science programs in colleges, and is significantly embedded in the enterprise sector. it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part or a black swan type of event to dislodge them any time soon.

ziont 8y ago
2k hook in for the license and then charging half a mil for actually implementing your data and biz model?
- ineedasername 8y ago
  Do you mean that as Tableau's cost? Not where I'm at. And maybe you'd have to pay half a mil to implement a data model if you're hiring consultants and starting from scratch, but if you're in such a state that's going to be a cost no matter the product. No product is going to model your data for you or build something like a semantic layer. Those are (mostly) completely separate tasks from the BI layer. Where I'm at we simply pointed Tableau at existing data sources built for performance reporting already.
blowski 8y ago
Bit of anecdata: I used Looker in a previous gig, where we used it mostly a development tool for constructing and optmising difficult queries. The business continued to use Tableau for BI.
- cuchoi 8y ago
  How did you use Looker to optimize queries?
tensor 8y ago
We're going through the process of getting a BI solution. There are many players and Tableau doesn't fair well against them. I can see them holding on to existing customers because switching is hard, but they absolutely have a lot of competition for new sales.
- feydaykyn 8y ago
  Would you share the ones you found worthwhile? Our business wants PowerBI, but the sys admin side sounds like a pain : it seems we need: 1) a consultant to setup the visualisations 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases 3) the api automation capabilities are unclear says the expert (eg: create a new dashboard for a new customer ? Update all the visualisations through a script? Etc) PowerBI feels so Microsoftish, I'm really on the market for something else
  - mjirv 8y ago
    Looker's API functionality is pretty extensive if that's something you care a lot about.
  - mbesto 8y ago
    PowerBI is really an amazing for the price point (free-ish for O365 accounts) for most businesses out there (10~300 employees). It's not one size fits all and YMMV. 1) You have this problem regardless 2) Huh? Why not just the cloud version? Are you trying to report directly on a productive transactional database for a software app? See #3 about source of data. 3) Depends on your source data. I build a dashboard for sales in with data from SalesForce in like 2 hours.
  - go_prodev 8y ago
    I'm currently helping a large company with their transition from Tableau/SAP/Excel to Power BI. The adoption has been extremely painless and business users are very comfortable creating reports and discovering new ways to represent their data. In response to your points above... 1) A consultant is not required to set up visualisations. With minimal training (a few hours) most users understand the fundamentals and are ready to go. 2) We use AWS Redshift. You have the option to import data into Power BI or do a direct query from the cloud platform to Redshift with odbc. 3) what are you trying to do with the API? To automate reports you normally set up a gateway connection to your data source and schedule the refresh in powerbi cloud. No API required normally. It also can use office 365 or Azure AD for single sign on, making sys admin activities a breeze. Send me a message if you want to discuss anything specific and I'd be happy to help you out.
zhobbs 8y ago
"it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part" As a former customer of Tableau, it feels like this has already happened right? I worked at a company where many teams used it, and there were zero defenders of Tableua when it came time to decide whether to renew...it's a mess, especially on Mac.
- bsg75 8y ago
  Is there an alternative on Mac? Any tool that has a purely web based design UI is not limited to an OS, so the alternatives would have to supply a native Mac design tool as Tableau does.
  - harrisreynolds 8y ago
    We are working on a cross-platform solution at Chartly. We are still early but can already create dashboards more quickly than what I've seen Tableau do. See https://chart.ly/ https://chart.ly/ for details! :-)
- ineedasername 8y ago
  my workplace uses both Cognos and Tableau. compared to cognos, tableau is a dream to use. There's some non overlapping functionality in cognos, but where tableau can be used it is greatly preferred. Coming from that "traditional" enterprise BI, tableau feels anything but stagnant. Spotfire seems like the closest competitor, but its barrier for entry went up sharply after acquisition. Power BI has a ways to go (but I think given the tech stack behind MS is the biggest threat to tableau as it matures long term)

olivermarks 8y ago

Growing a startup '70%' is very different to running a publicly listed global company '...Looker is trying to become cash flow positive -- and its revenues are growing faster than its headcount. "We have visibility to cash flow break even over the next couple of years. We plateaued in spending. We now have 600 employees and expect to add 200 in 2019. We are seeing our cash burn rate decline," he explained.'

kgc 8y ago
How can they add so many employees and have costs decline? Are employees not their majority cost?
- olivermarks 8y ago
  making more revenue

sevensor 8y ago

I'm not sure the analysis front-end is really where the money is at. There are lots of industries that have trouble getting their data to a place where it can be analyzed at all. I know some very successful companies here in flyover country that picked a sector where this is a problem and made a business of fixing it.

thenaturalist 8y ago
Would you mind sharing some examples? I'm in the Business Intelligence space and always interested in what is available for integration & ETL.
- sevensor 8y ago
  Ag is huge, as you might expect from flyover country. Pipelines. Marketing data.

CryoLogic 8y ago

Just a question on wording, but doesn't 70% imply currentRevenue * .7. Whereas they really mean 170% aka currentRevenue * 1.7?

giarc 8y ago
It can mean anything the company wants. 70% more site visits per month, trial users, support requests, paid users etc etc. Unless explicitly stated, it's hard to determine what metric they are talking about.
raquo 8y ago
Growth is expressed as % over the previous period, not of previous period, so 70% is the right number in this context.

mwexler 8y ago

This is another "Forbes Contributor" post. This means that it's just a blog post, though, admittedly, Cohan is a smart guy. Does anyone else think Forbes should do more to separate volunteer content from editorially directed and reviewed journalistic content? Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand? It feels like, to me, someone saying "I went to Stanford" in a conversation because they walked on the campus. Just because Forbes hosts the content doesn't mean it's at the same quality as a true Forbes spawned story. Since the Forbes.com front page appears to now be almost 3/4 contributors, I guess it's working for them. Still feels wrong.

sailfast 8y ago
I typically ignore things on Forbes for this reason. In this case, Mr. Cohan works in venture capital for SoFi (according to his Twitter bio) and it's not immediately clear if he has a stake in any of these companies or why he's taking a shot at Tableau other than for the clickbait. It would be nice to know whether his current employer has any material stake in either company before reading. I understand he is also a business school professor but I would expect a disclaimer for an article like this.
zhobbs 8y ago
There is a really big metric on their dashboard, "Pageviews", and this is a best of all worlds solution (cheaper, more content, diverse content, diverse authors promoting their content, forbes.com SEO juice, etc).
johnatwork 8y ago
Yeah I tend to ignore Contributor "articles" such as these, they are so one sided, and seem more like an ad than anything else.
stevecalifornia 8y ago
Forbes is cashing in their brand name, built over a long period of time, for quick wins. It's sad that they don't value their legacy.
- 8y ago

trhway 8y ago

Sounds like IPO prep.

thebiglebrewski 8y ago

We use Looker and it's amazing. Comparing it with Tableau was laughable for people used to modern SaaS tools. Tableau was so far behind...

georgewfraser 8y ago

My company shares a lot of customers with Looker, and from my point of view there’s a couple reasons why they’re so successful. First, Looker has two layers. The dashboard layer gives you tables, charts and filters. The explore layer allows you to go in and build your own pivot tables off the same underlying models. No other BI tool has built an explore layer that’s as successful in practice as Looker’s. Second, the underlying model of both layers is written in code and under version control. This probably makes sense to most HN readers but in the BI world this is very contrarian. If you ask most business users who make BI purchasing decisions, version control and pull requests are the last thing they’ll ask for. But it turns out it’s exactly what you need to maintain a complex BI deployment.

numbsafari 8y ago
The version control and pull request design is exactly why I've selected Looker. LookML enables the power of the explore functionality as well. Looker's visualizations, however, are very weak when compared to the competition. It's been their weakness for years now, and they've really failed to address it. One aspect of Looker that I've also generally enjoyed is their on-boarding and support processes. They do a superb job at this and I feel like they should be a model for startups selling into B2B.
- georgewfraser 8y ago
  I agree that their viz is weak. I comfort myself by saying that this is the easy part and they'll surely fix it eventually...still waiting after two years.
  - groj 8y ago
    I think the community can have a big impact here, there are so many libraries that make it easy to add custom visuals. Specifically, vega is incredible https://vega.github.io/ https://vega.github.io/ and there is a port for Looker https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite https://github.com/groodlooker/vega-lite

madamelic 8y ago

Forbes seems to be 95% ads now. Not just the content. I went on the page and a huge 3/4 page banner scrolled my view, then another popped into the side, then Forbes had a pop over asking for my email. Yikes!

rchaud 8y ago
Places like Forbes, Inc and Huffpost appear to exist solely for content writers to use their logo on their portfolio websites under the heading "Published In: ".
- jjtheblunt 8y ago
  Well they're also "owned" by lobbyist-style groups. HuffPost is clearly (ludicrously) pro Democrat, Forbes anti-Apple, and so on. It's close to amusing.

manigandham 8y ago

Tableau is the best at getting non-technical users to be instantly productive, and is completely unmatched in pure analytical abilities and visualizations. They aren't standing still here either. However Tableau has absolutely screwed up their evolution into a cloud-based service. The current single-user desktop software with client/server design is painful and archaic, and the Tableau cloud is just a hosted server run on undersized hardware. They are losing a lot of business renewals because of this, even if the consultancy and enterprise deals will keep going for awhile.

xemdetia 8y ago
Something I want to complain about here is the complete lack of due diligence that product-based, enterprise-focused companies fail at as they move to SaaS. If your primary customers are Federal/Finance/Health Care, you can't pull the plug on a product that is on prem and put it in the cloud until you get the compliance ducks in a row. I had hoped that GDPR would have fixed that but I am still seeing several companies making the same mistakes even today where this playbook should have been figured out.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Sure, but I don't think that's the problem here. Tableau's architecture is client/server using "workbook" files instead of a central server accessible via the web. They need to change that first, then they can make on-prem and hosted versions of it.
nomel 8y ago
> completely unmatched in pure analytical abilities and visualizations. Have you tried looked at Tibco Spotfire? I'd say it's a very good match. I find it much more intuitive than Tableau.
- manigandham 8y ago
  I don't want desktop software from the 90s anymore.
8y ago

joshdance 8y ago

Better (less clickbaity) headline: Looker raises 103 million in a series E to compete in enterprise BI.

capkutay 8y ago
I really hate the 'This startup's revenue grew at x%!' Like what does that actually mean? For all we know they went from $100k to $170k in revenue while raising $100 million dollars. It could either be very impressive or just lame click bait to inflate a company they invested way too much money in.

NicoJuicy 8y ago

Anyone checked PowerBI from Microsoft? I think it's a great BI solution that isn't widely known yet. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA

itslennysfault 8y ago
Isn't widely known? It was the top rated BI solution by Gartner in 2017 and 2018. Full disclosure I used to work on it, and when I left we had over a million users so some people might have heard of it. [2017](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-microsoft-as-a-leader-in-bi-and-analytics-platforms-for-ten-consecutive-years/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-m...) [2018](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-recognizes-microsoft-as-a-leader-in-analytics-and-bi-platforms-for-11-consecutive-years/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-recognizes-...)
rchaud 8y ago
PowerBI is very well known.

mjirv 8y ago

Has anyone used Arcadia Data (the other company mentioned in the article) and have thoughts on it? I work in BI and had never heard of it before reading this.

dcposch 8y ago

Surprised nobody here mentioned Mode Analytics. Unlike Looker or Tableau, it requires users to know SQL. That said: if you're an org where the business people know SQL or are willing to learn--Mode is clean, simple, and super powerful. My company had a great experience with this. Our COO was super proficient with Excel. I showed him basic SQL, he loves it and has learned quickly. The jump from Excel power user to SQL user is totally doable, and probably most people making custom reports are already at least in the former category! Additionally, a few of us have substantial Pandas experience: Mode makes it trivial to go from SQL to a Jupyter like notebook w Pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn etc all already there--no need for Python version or dependency hell. Zero devops at any layer below the raw datastore (MySQL / Redshift / etc). It's really nice. You write code purely against open standards--SQL, pandas etc. Looker uses a proprietary query language, LookML. I am not tempted to go learn it.

thongda 8y ago
Not the same level, Tableau is super strong in visualization, Looker is about Data Modeling, the new language is not that hard, but the most valuable thing is data model and explore

bradhe 8y ago

Just exited a company the was competitive to Tableau and Looker. The BI space is insanely competitive, the lock in is very deep, and there are a thousand small players swimming in the wake of Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, and a few other "owners" of the category. Looker doesn't threaten Tableau. It doesn't need to--at least for now. The space is growing at a crazy rate.

harrisreynolds 8y ago

There is lots of opportunity still to innovate in this space. We are focusing on making it super easy to create great looking charts and dashboards really easily at Chartly [1]. Personally I am surprised by lots of the "state of the art" options out there where the result is EITHER ugly or HARD TO USE. We still have a ways to go, but you can create good looking, interactive dashboards with our platform very easily. Here is an example of a dashboard with NFL data: https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard [1] https://chart.ly https://chart.ly

qwertycrackers 8y ago

My company uses Looker a lot. It's fairly good. My only complaint is that its web-native interface makes it AWFULLY slow to do the simplest things.